Dominion As A Means To An End
Structural Racism is About Power and Money
Right outside of San Antonio, on the edge of the Hill Country is a suburban enclave called The Dominion. Basketball players, entertainers, musicians, and the rich elite live there. It is gated, has a country club, and backs up to Camp Bullis, a training ground for the Air Force, Army, Marines, and home to an Army National Guard Armory. The reason I know this is when I was in the Army National Guard many years ago we got a complaint one weekend from someone who lived there because our tracked vehicles were disturbing their peaceful evening. We kept doing what we were doing, but our company commander ordered us to stand down after sunset. Now that’s dominion, and if you’re not familiar with the term:
dominion /də-mĭn′yən/
NOUN
Control or the exercise of control; sovereignty.
A territory or sphere of influence or control; a realm.
A self-governing nation under the nominal rule of the British monarch.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
My Place In The Corporation - A Cautionary Tale
In my youth, I thought I understood American history. Sure, there were terrible things done, but that was all in the past, right? We’ve come to terms with them, those necessary and unnecessary speed-bumps on the road of progress; and anyway, minorities have full rights, just like everyone else today. With the Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Acts, and all the protests and President Johnson pushing through his Great Society social programs in the 1960s - the fight had been won! This was the story I was given, and as a young man I was never encouraged or thought to dig deeper or question the narrative by the experts who wrote the history books, or my teachers and professors in the first half of my life. It just ‘was’ - a matter of history - a matter of fact. Then I got married, had children, got a job to support that family, and didn’t think much about it as the duties of my jobs and family - survival - required my focus. I couldn’t afford to be politically active, or so I thought. My leaders in the political sphere and in business world did not encourage me to be. They had this, just like the previous 3 decades of stability I enjoyed growing up in the 60s,70s, and 80s.
The first chapter of my life after graduating high school was serving in the US Air Force which I did for nearly 4 years - the government offered to let me go a few months early since I wasn’t going to reenlist. Married by that time, I decided to join the Army National Guard and served an additional 10 years as a Cavalry Scout and near the end as an Infantry squad leader. I loved the Army, but with a family now and Desert Storm over (what I naively thought had to be the last major land war) I thought there was no future in the military, and chose to go to college and try my hand at something completely different - Aviation, and then Computer Science. After college, I entered the job market. Over the years a cognitive dissonance grew as I ran up against one conundrum after another in my jobs, and this really became evident when I was employed by a “Fortune 100” company a few years out of college.
First it was the actions of the corporation. I started off as a low level ‘manager’, even though I had no direct reports. I was a Unix system administrator, technical support engineer, and did computer programming as part of those duties to start with. Part of the reason for making us managers was to avoid both overtime pay, and unions, among other things I would find out later. As the years progressed, more and more I was lectured on how my actions impacted “shareholder value.” Shareholder value, or increasing the value of our company stock over time, was of paramount concern in our day to day actions. How much could we save from the budget, and still get the job done? Could we work with less head count? Would a particular product rollout make enough profit to justify the expenditure? Little was spoken of the company’s impact to the communities in which it resided, beyond charitable giving - which decreased year over year, as the employee’s share remained consistent. Almost nothing was said about any negative impacts, beyond what was required by laws or regulations. In the early days of my employment, we actually got stock options, in lieu of larger bonuses and raises, that at some point in the future we could exercise to turn into stocks. I was forced to learn about finances - and it always seemed like a game of chance where the rules gave you options to influence outcomes. We became the shareholders they lectured us about, which made me think - would I have been better off with cash or a larger salary, rather than stock options? As a shareholder, what did I want the company to do and to represent?
Six years into my employment I was able to exercise several portions of my stock options which were valued at approximately $27 each; the stock price went over $50 - so I elected to take the options, and turn around and sell - giving me a profit of $23 per share of 800 shares - for a grand total of $18,400. I was making $40,000 at the time so this was a significant sum, and allowed us go from renting to living in a house with a mortgage for my family of four. Almost immediately, the stock price dropped below $25. All of my remaining options were above $25 so I was ‘underwater’, and this lasted throughout my career to the point were I lost all my remaining options before the stock price went above $27 again, which answered my question: it would have been better to have a raise or larger bonuses over that same time span than the options (I did some math at the time, and determined that a single raise of 10% would have earned me an additional $80,000 over the same time frame - way more than the $18,400. I was forced to gamble, whether I wanted to or not.) Stock options were gambling that the stock would be higher at some future point in time, and the gamble did not pay off for me and only helped the company dodge out on compensating me; they gambled and won - I lost. Little did I know at the time that gambling was a key aspect of Neoliberalism and the breakdown of New Deal laws that were protecting us from a financial system run amok.
In a few years they stopped giving low level ‘managers’ stock options at all. In fact, they originally paid 100% for our medical coverage, and that too started shifting over for us to pay. Bonuses also started to thin out as well. Our real take-home pay dwindled as a result. I witnessed these changes, the effects on the people around me, and wondered where all the money was going. In 2007 I had to apply for bankruptcy protections; between our bills, educational costs for the children, my own student loans, and trying to help our parents who were in a similar situation, we just were not able to make ends meet. Another telling point, our mortgage was sold 3 times to different companies, and we weren’t notified in time the first time, to avoid late payments; I wondered if they were trying to make us default so they could take our property. This was just a precursor to the Great Recession.
Then it was actions of the VPs, Presidents of divisions, and department heads like the COO, CFO, and CEO - the so-called ‘C-suite’. The company I joined at the beginning of my career was the remains of an antitrust lawsuit that forced the original parent company to split up (divest) into smaller entities. Because of regulations specific to our industry, the unit I worked in was a wholly owned subsidiary of the parent corporation, and operated as a separate P&L - to put that in simple terms, we operated like a separate small business with our own budget, and recorded our own profits separate from the larger corporation. We had about 200 people when I started working there. I started at $22,000 a year - which was way more than I was making at my previous job, and even though it really wasn’t enough for a family of three - and later four people, I really enjoyed my job in that first decade. I had autonomy; if I saw something broken, I could fix it. If there was a need for a new process, I could make it happen myself, and resources, while not extravagant, were available. We made it a point to shepherd those resources responsibly to give our teams the best tools they could have and we grew. I did well, and progressed in my career and salary.
During this time, the President of our parent company made it clear that he was on a mission to rebuild the old company again from strategically chosen pieces of the original along with new acquisitions. The divestiture had a life span, and once that time was up our parent corporation began a period of mergers and acquisitions. They were made possible by the profitability of the different branches of the company, including my own subsidiary, as well as deregulation that occurred since the original antitrust ruling. The parent company had an ample ‘war chest’ to proceed, and they did, buying out one company after another. Part of the merger process was efforts to determine ‘Best Practices’ for the new merged corporation. As you might expect, duplication of functions - like Human Resources - provided an opportunity to cut redundant jobs. I was involved in this process as part of a team from my subsidiary, and we were grouped with our counterparts from the merging company. We took it very seriously, and hashed through all our operational processes and jobs, and luckily for us, we found very little redundancy. We did lean towards our processes as being ‘Best’ given we were the entity buying out the other company that had fallen on hard times, leading to standardization across both entities. The process was very shark-like and was as you would expect going into a room full of people trying to save their own jobs, and that of their teams. Given what we are seeing today with Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts, I can understand how you could screw things up if you don’t know what you’re doing. This preoccupied my time throughout the early 2000s, and when the Great Recession hit I was fortunate to be able to keep my job, when so many were being lost, and those above me advised I should be grateful.
After the company consolidated again into a multinational-corporation, Trump was elected to his first term and put through the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018”. I recall discussions in the office about what this would mean for us, and officers of the corporation came down strongly in support of it. It was sold as increasing jobs, and putting more money in everyone’s pockets. Simultaneous to Trump riding down the golden escalator to announce his campaign for President, our little subsidiary that operated like a small business for so long was dissolved, and our positions were sucked into divisions of the larger corporation. I was running a team by this time, and my team was put in a structure that was headed up by people from the original divested corporation. All the (mostly) old guys running the corporation from the C-Suite had “put the band back together” - and knew each other from working together in their younger days. This final merger was not seen as a meeting of equals, and the shoe was on the other foot. Whatever loyalty and recognition our management had for our efficiency and capabilities took second place to their loyalty to their existing teams and buddies at the top of the ladder from the old corporation. My last four years at the corporation became a series of ‘right sizing’, and budget cutting operations that impacted my team, even as the corporation posted record profits ($10 Billion in 2017 and $14 Billion in 2018 due to windfalls of the Tax Cut Act). As I mentioned before, between the Great Recession, and actions by the corporation to reduce spending on workers, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018 made no discernible benefit to our lives. The disconnect between increasing net profits, and lowering operating expenses, made me wonder where the money was going. What was going on?
As luck would have it, I inherited a system used by the C-suite executives to manage their stock options and bonuses (the previous team managing it had been ‘reorganized’ due to cost cutting measures, and it fell in my lap). I not only had access to change the software - which I had to do each year - I also had access to the database. What I saw made me realize where the money was going. While we lowly workers were living under austerity measures, and scrimping for each dollar we spent, the executives were reaping the rewards of the large profits we were booking through their bonuses and stock options. Average executive compensation was $12 million per year, and grew in the years following Trump’s administration. Bad years literally didn’t impact them, given the bonus amounts involved coupled with their astronomical salary. Was this legal - yes. Was it ethical - I think not: the haves were taking from the have-nots in down years to maintain their financial position and that of the other external shareholders, offloading the impacts and responsibility on the workers. This is the moment I became acutely aware of the structural injustice built into the corporate system and abetted by their efforts to manipulate government, regardless of party, to help increase their control: those at the top barely noticed what was happening in the real world around them, or if they did they didn’t show that they cared. They were sure to get theirs, and they never had to choose between making their mortgage payment, and feeding the kids. Those below them were too busy trying to stay afloat, to have much time to think about it, and most folks saw this as a defect of character or ability on the part of people in such situations. Year after year, the turning of the screw both added workload, and extracted funds from the pockets of the people below them; a demented transference of wealth we’ve seen before during the Gilded Age:
As a newly minted team manager the company began to push down HR responsibilities via newly automated procedures to us, further burdening our schedules while saving the HR department headcount and money. Our director was responsible for pay treatment and he decided to delegate the grunt work of working out pay treatment to his team leaders. In my last 2 years with the company I became responsible for overseeing pay treatment and bonuses for my team. Team leaders would put forward what we thought our team members deserved based on their performance, and the director made the final decision, allocating the budget for each employee for the final adjustments. This gave me more access to the HR systems that showed all of my team members, including their salary, bonuses, and other key HR information for them. What really jumped out at me was the salaries for the women on my team in comparison to the men. The women had been with the company longer, and yet their salaries were 30% lower than all of the men. Before becoming their team leader, I worked with all of the people on my team for a decade or more, so I knew what they did, how they did it, and the women were some of the best members of my team. When anyone tried to tell me our company was a merit based system, I would have to laugh in their face after that. So, I set out to do something about it.
I would pay the men what they reasonably should be paid, and I shifted the majority of the bonus funds and percentage uplift over to the women to close the gap. I talked to my peers about what I was doing, and none of them had strong opinions about it - I guess no skin in the game. When I submitted the treatments, my boss called me in and we had a detailed discussion about what I was doing. He also worked with everyone involved for decades. After explaining my rationale, he agreed with what I was doing - and that’s how it went down. The women, for their part were very humble and appreciative about it; the uplift got them nearly 1/2 way to parity with the men. For at least one of them it was a godsend, as they were having financial troubles and their partner was disabled and not able to work, something they didn’t share with me until after the fact. Most of the men were okay with their pay treatment, and a few were angry about it. There was no end of grumblings as their expectations didn’t match my analysis of what they did and did not do. The ones who were angry were my lowest performers. They expected continuation of preferential treatment given over many years. I was called the “worse boss” they ever had. The enmity made it hard to work with them, but I persevered anyway. They wouldn’t have to work with me for long.
In 2019 I was let go - just at the point I was eligible for a minimal retirement. My final job was to transfer my team and projects over to my peers. I left the company with a lump sum payment, and basic retirement benefits - like access to the company healthcare plan; hardly the naive ending I envisioned when I started. I also left with the determination never to do that again in the time I had remaining on this earth.
History of Dominion
It is important for all of us to understand black history in America because it has shaped who we are as a nation. Inextricable from that, the systems established for colonization and exploitation planted the seeds for the systems we still deal with today. Understanding one can give us insight into the other, and perhaps show us a way through the disaster we find ourselves in today.
I came to this conclusion during the Covid pandemic. I spent time working on our existing home in order to make it saleable after 17 years of wear and tear, and to move into the new home without incurring the costs of a moving service. The idea was to move into a more ‘retirement friendly’ single story home now that our kids had moved and gone off to college. Fresh off that 22 year debacle of my career, I now had time to think and really observe the disaster that was the first Trump administration. As the 2020 election approached, my wife and I decided to get involved in our local politics by supporting a local progressive candidate for the House of Representatives who was trying to primary a right leaning Democrat incumbent, and as part of that effort we also were engaged in the Bernie Sander’s primary. We phone banked for him and our candidate, and went to see him speak. What he said made sense, particularly his criticism of neoliberal capitalism, which aligned with my own experience in the corporate world: corporations and the wealthy were not looking out for the interests of the middle class, working class, and poor people. I never really understood how catastrophically our system had been broken by the roll back of turn of the last century Progressive Era and New Deal Era laws and regulations that helped build the middle class, but more than that as I dug deeper into the past I became aware of deeper trends that drove the system today that reach back beyond the European conquest of the western hemisphere. The beginning of dominion is also the beginning of the multinational corporation.
The earliest example of corporations reaches back to the Roman Republic around 44 BC. Incorporation of an entity required the approval of the Roman Senate, and the Emperor (Julius Caesar and later Caesar Augustus), and thus from the beginning was a power bestowed by government. “These [entities] included the state itself (the Populus Romanus), municipalities, and such private associations as sponsors of a religious cult, burial clubs, political groups, and guilds of craftsmen or traders. Such bodies commonly had the right to own property and make contracts, to receive gifts and legacies, to sue and be sued, and, in general, to perform legal acts through representatives.”(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History) Emperor Justinian, who reigned the Byzantine Empire from 527 to 565 AD and was by all accounts a prolific workaholic, expanded the Eastern Empire by taking parts of the collapsed Western Empire, and North Africa. “One of the most enduring aspects of his legacy was the uniform rewriting of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, which was first applied throughout Continental Europe and is still the basis of civil law in many modern states.”(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian_I) During the Middle Ages from the 11th to the 14th centuries, the Corpus Juris Civilis was resurrected and annotated, and the corporation and related body politic to describe government were enshrined in law. The alleged oldest commercial corporation was the Stora Kopparberg mining community in Falun, Sweden, which obtained a charter from King Magnus Eriksson in 1347 and operated until 1992! In medievel Europe it was common for churches and local governments to be incorporated, primarily because the entity could continue on beyond the lives of its initial participants. The powers of these corporations weren’t consistently applied, and government and royal charter companies provided a variety of powers for the owners.
Throughout the Age of Discovery, European traders were looking for alternative and more secure routes to Asia. Silk and spices were in high demand in Europe, and European merchants wanted to corner the market. The “Silk Road” overland route was costly and dangerous to traverse under normal circumstances, but in 1453 it was closed to Christian traders when Constantinople was captured by the Ottoman Empire. The “Cape Route” around the southern tip of Africa held its own dangers of bad weather and high seas in the ‘roaring 40s’. In either case, the venture was risky, and payoff was not guaranteed after an extended wait with funds tied up. Before the formation of the Dutch East India Company, Dutch trading expedition fleets were financed for a single trip. If and after the fleet returned, the agreement would be dissolved, and another fleet formed. This led to inconsistent trade, and fluctuations in the markets that negatively impacted profits from these ventures. With fierce competition and wars flaring between the seafaring nations, the English decided to form cartels that would work together and monopolize the trade for a period of time as partially state owned enterprises that would maintain consistent flow of commodities and thus profits.
The first such cartel was the English East India Company (aka: “Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies”), and it was destined to be the largest in the world at its peak. Queen Elizabeth granted the company a royal charter for 15 years: a monopoly on English trade with all countries east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan. Furthermore, any traders there without a license from the company were liable to forfeiture of their ships and cargo (half of which would go to the Crown and half to the company), as well as imprisonment at the "royal pleasure". After Elizabeth’s death, James I extended the charter indefinitely, and this support by the crown allowed the company to prosper over many years as the British Empire expanded. When word got through to the Dutch, the English East India Company served as a model for their own long term efforts in forming the Dutch East Indies corporation.
The Dutch East India Company was formed on the 20th of March 1602 and marked a significant departure from previous corporations. It was one of the first joint stock companies in the world, where shares of the company could be bought by citizens of the Dutch Republic, and bought and sold on secondary markets - establishing the first modern stock exchange. It is also considered the first multinational corporation due to the different countries it traded with. It is believed to have the first globally recognizable company logo (V with O and C as on flag above). It was also significant because of the government charter it was granted. In addition to being granted monopoly to conduct trade in Asia, it also had quasi-governmental powers including the right to wage wars, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, strike coins, and establish colonies; all the ingredients for what was to follow.
But it would be Christopher Columbus who triggered a frenzy of colonization to an unknown continent across the Atlantic ocean. His idea was to find a western route to Asia - his thinking that the Earth was roughly 3/4 as large as it really is, and with the southern route particularly long and dangerous, perhaps going west would solve the problem. Commentators have argued that Columbus was a Christian millennialist and apocalypticist and that these beliefs motivated his quest for Asia in a variety of ways. Columbus often wrote about seeking gold in the log books of his voyages and writes about acquiring it "in such quantity that the sovereigns... will undertake and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulcher" in a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. His plan for going west to get to the east was turned down several times by King John II of Portugal on the word of his advisors: the trip to Japan was too far for ships of the day to sustain provisions based on accurate calculations of the circumference of the Earth.
Finally, after several years of consideration while Columbus survived on an allowance provided by them (so as not to lose his idea to another kingdom), King Ferdinand II and Queen Issabella I of Spain finally granted a charter for his proposal to sail west, and promised Columbus that if he succeeded he would be given the rank of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and appointed Viceroy and Governor of all the new lands he might claim for Spain. He had the right to nominate three persons, from whom the sovereigns would choose one, for any office in the new lands. He would be entitled to one-tenth (diezmo) of all the revenues from the new lands in perpetuity. He also would have the option of buying one-eighth interest in any commercial venture in the new lands, and receive one-eighth (ochavo) of the profits.. His landing in 1492 during his first voyage on an island in the Bahamas, named Guanahani by the local inhabitants, marked the end of the Pre-Columbian era and the beginning of a different kind of apocalypse for the inhabitants of the ‘new’ world. It is not clear if he ever realized he found a new continent, or not before he died. What is clear is his treatment of the native peoples, whom he called ‘indios’ - indians - was horrible, with accusations of brutality as colonial governor that forced his arrest and removal from his post in Hispaniola. This was to be a continuing theme throughout the colonization of the Americas, who’s thousands of years of cultural development and self governance were brushed aside and destroyed behind European justifications based on exceptionalism and Christian mysticism. News of his discovery spread throughout Europe, spurring on new ventures.
In his later years, Columbus demanded that the Crown of Castile give him his tenth of all the riches and trade goods yielded by the new lands, as stipulated in the Capitulations of Santa Fe. Because he had been relieved of his duties as governor, the Crown did not feel bound by that contract and his demands were rejected. After his death at age 54, his heirs sued the Crown for a part of the profits from trade with America, as well as other rewards. This led to a protracted series of legal disputes known as the pleitos colombinos ('Columbian lawsuits').
The use of native people as slaves by the Spanish began immediately as their conquest progressed, and were such a disaster for the native population due to military actions to subdue them, overwork, and the spread of smallpox; so much so that royal laws protecting indigenous people were established in 1512, just 2 decades after Columbus’s first contact. African slaves were first brought to the Spanish colonies in 1501 and increased as it became apparent they were not as susceptible to smallpox and other diseases as the native Americans whose populations were crashing. Production was paramount in all their long term ventures and slaves were the most important means of production of cane sugar, the primary export from the Caribbean.
The next century saw the scramble of other countries to get in on the opportunities in the ‘new’ world - primarily England, France, and the Dutch. The Dutch West India Company - formed by a group who didn’t like the monopolistic practices of the Dutch East India Company (!?), managed to gain funding and a charter for these new western lands, as well as the west coast of Africa and control over the African slave trade - their own monopoly. Unlike the Dutch East Indies Company, the Dutch West Indies Company did not have authority to maintain a standing army. One commonality between the two companies is they both took actions independent of the wishes of the shareholders which caused an uproar among investors.
The Dutch West Indies company blundered along for a number of years without much to show for it, and then switched to privateering, capturing a Spanish silver fleet, and turning around their fortunes for awhile. This was not a long term solution for profits, so more focus was placed on trying to oust the Portuguese from their holdings in Brazil without success. Meanwhile the New Netherlands colony was formed in 1621 - an area stretching from present day Delaware to Massachusetts - the company also formed the city of New Amsterdam based around a fort that became the capital of the colony (in what is present day New York City), and made efforts to entice settlers to the area. By the 1650s the settlement had reached the height of its growth by the Dutch, but by 1667 the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War gave New Netherlands to the British whose colonies in New England, and Virginia hemmed in the Dutch to the north and south. Even as their colonies dwindled in North America, their slave trade expanded with the establishment of Curaçao as a center of the Atlantic slave trade, bringing slaves from West Africa to the island, before selling them elsewhere in the Caribbean and Spanish Main. Spain stepped away from the slave trade, contracting intermediaries instead, such as the Dutch, and with the fall of the Iberian Union - Portugal was denied the right to transport slaves directly in 1648. Starting in the 1670s, a new wave of slave trade by the English, French, and Dutch ramped up as demand increased in the Americas.
The English now formed thirteen colonies along the eastern seaboard with the consolidation of New Netherlands. Initially manpower was achieved through indentured servitude in the colonies through most of the 17th century - and this included indentured servants from Africa. Over half of Europeans traveling to the colonies were indentured servants between 1650 and the Revolutionary War. Indentured servitude was used mostly in the area from Virginia to New Jersey; over time free men who had completed their contracts were the most plentiful form of workers in the area. The shift from indentured servitude to slavery was a gradual process in Virginia; “The earliest legal documentation of such a shift was in 1640 where a black man, John Punch, was sentenced to lifetime slavery, forcing him to serve his master, Hugh Gwyn, for the remainder of his life, for attempting to run away. This case was significant because it established the disparity between his sentence as a black man and that of the two white indentured servants who escaped with him (one described as Dutch and one as a Scotchman). It is the first documented case of a black man sentenced to lifetime servitude and is considered one of the first legal cases to make a racial distinction between black and white indentured servants.” John Punch is considered the first slave in the English colonies. “After 1640, planters started to ignore the expiration of indentured contracts and keep their servants as slaves for life. This was demonstrated by the 1655 case Johnson v. Parker, where the court ruled that a black man, Anthony Johnson of Virginia, was granted ownership of another black man, John Casor, as the result of a civil case. This was the first instance of a judicial determination in the Thirteen Colonies holding that a person who had committed no crime could be held in servitude for life.”
The records of the justification for slavery go back to the writings of the ancient greek philosophers:
“For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule...
Aristotle (384–322 BC) - Politics
Some people, he said, were born natural slaves and ought to be slaves under any circumstances. Other people were born to rule these slaves, could use these slaves as they pleased and could treat them as property. Natural slaves were slaves because their souls weren't complete - they lacked certain qualities, such as the ability to think properly, and so they needed to have masters to tell them what to do.
The Greek philosopher Plato thought similarly that it was right for the 'better' to rule over the 'inferior'.
“...nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior.
Plato (428-348 BC) - Gorgias
Homer (~8th century BC) believed enslaving a person changed them, making them inferior forever more:
“Jove takes half the goodness out of a man when he makes a slave of him.
Christian theologians carried on this line of reasoning, equating the failings of sin as additional justification:
“The prime cause, then, of slavery is sin, which brings man under the dominion of his fellow -- that which does not happen save by the judgment of God, with whom is no unrighteousness, and who knows how to award fit punishments to every variety of offence.
St Augustine (354–430 AD) - The City of God, 19:15
Thomas Aquinas largely agreed with Augustine that slavery was the result of the Fall, but he also thought that the universe did have a natural structure that gave some men authority over others, pointing out the natural hierarchy of heaven where Angels have superiority over others.
“…for men of outstanding intelligence naturally take command, while those who are less intelligent but of more robust physique, seem intended by nature to act as servants.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 AD) - Summa Contra Gentiles
Pope Nicholas V's papal bulls (proclamations) Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1454) were used to justify enslavement, identifying certain populations as enemies “rising against the Catholic faith and struggling to extinguish Christian Religion” - namely Muslims and pagans.
The Bible - particularly the old testament - was mined liberally to justify slavery in later years:
In the book of Genesis, Noah condemns Canaan (son of Ham) to perpetual servitude: "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers" (Genesis 9:25).
It is not clear to me if xenophobia and bigotry drove these ideas, or if the reverse is true. From this emerged the social construct of racism which has been used extensively to justify a hierarchy with White Europeans at the top and everyone else at the bottom. As this began to emerge, the southern colonies formed and established plantation based industry and economies that were dependent upon slavery as the primary means of production. At the time of the Revolutionary War slavery was legal in all of the states, but after the war, it split between slave states, in the South, and states that abolished slavery in the North. This would lead to the Civil War in 1861.
While records are not complete, it is believed that 15.3 million people were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic between 1501 and 1851 of which 12.5 million were transported by countries and the rest by privateers; 1.8 million died en-route and were unceremoniously buried at sea. More died in captivity, and the mortality rate was high in Haiti and Brazil and other islands in the West Indies due to the difficulty of labor in sugar plantations. 388,747 of the enslaved people were transported to the colonies in North America.
It was not until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 that the institution of slavery finally was abolished by the British, but on a gradual basis. Since land owners in the British West Indies were losing their unpaid laborers, they received compensation totaling £20 million. Former slaves received no compensation.
In 1808 the Jefferson Administration prohibited the import of slaves, and the United States did not abolish slavery until the Civil War through first the Emancipation Proclamation - an Executive Order by President Abraham Lincoln - which immediately liberated all slaves in the rebelling states - practically enacted at the end of the war for every enslaved person in the former confederate states in 1865. In December of 1865 the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified abolishing slavery in the whole nation. There was also the “Act for the Release of certain Persons held to Service or Labor within the District of Columbia” passed during the war that applied $300 reparations to former slave owners for each slave released. Again, former slaves received no compensation, and by the end of Reconstruction in 1877, no plans were put in place to compensate freedmen.
The last country in the Americas to abolish slavery was Brazil, in 1888. Chattel slavery continued on in other parts of the world through the 20th century with the League of Nations and later United Nations establishing commissions to address the Middle Eastern/Indian Ocean/Red Sea slave trade. Chattel slavery was finally abolished in the Arabian Peninsula in the 1960s: Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, in Dubai in 1963, and Oman as the last in 1970. The last country to abolish slavery, Mauritania, did so in 1981, and only made it enforceable in 2007.
Slavery By Any Other Name…
Chattel slavery ended in the United States with the occupation of the secessionist states at the end of the Civil War, and the 13th Amendment. The Reconstruction Era followed. For 12 years Union forces occupied the South and enforced the law. President Lincoln developed the “Ten Percent Plan” in 1863 for states to rejoin the Union - if 10% of the voting population in a former Confederate state took an oath of loyalty to the United States, abided by emancipation, and agree to educate former slaves, then the Federal Government would allow them to reform union governments, elect representatives to congress, and pardon everyone except high ranking confederate army officers and government officials. He also thought by being lenient with the South, his executive order to emancipate the slaves wouldn’t have to be harshly enforced, and if Democrats were elected in the next Presidential election, they wouldn’t overturn the order (this, of course, being before the 13th Amendment was ratified after Lincoln’s death).
Moderate Republicans supported Lincoln’s plan and thought it would end the war faster. The Radical Republicans feared, rightfully, that the planter aristocracy would be restored and the blacks would be forced back into slavery. Some thought it not harsh enough, given the South started the war: they hoped to control the Reconstruction process, transform Southern society, disband the planter aristocracy, redistribute land, develop industry, and guarantee civil liberties for former slaves.
Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865 just as fighting drew to a close, and Andrew Johnson took over the administration. He pardoned thousands of high ranking confederate officers, and allowed the South to establish Black Codes that restricted the rights of freedmen. Many Northerners were disgusted and alarmed at his actions, fearing that the planter aristocracy would take over the South again.
On this wave of concern, the Radical Republicans rode to victory in the midterm elections in both houses of Congress. They immediately went to work and passed the Reconstruction Acts over Johnson's vetoes, setting out the terms by which the former Confederate states could be readmitted to the Union. Constitutional conventions held throughout the South gave Black men the right to vote. New state governments were established by a coalition of freedmen, supportive white Southerners, and Northern transplants.
"Redeemers" opposed them and wanted to restore white supremacy and reestablish the Democratic Party's control of Southern governments and society. Violent groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts, engaged in paramilitary insurgency and terrorism to disrupt the efforts of the Reconstruction governments and terrorize Republicans. President Ulysses S. Grant succeeded Johnson, and passed more laws with the help of the Radical Republicans to enforce civil rights including the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
People in the North grew weary of continuing resistance to Reconstruction by Southerners, and the cost of maintaining troops in the South; then the election of 1876 was marred by widespread black voter suppression in the South, which resulted in a contested outcome. An Electoral Commission resulted in the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes on the understanding that federal troops would be withdrawn from the South, effectively bringing Reconstruction to an end.
The Nadir of American race relations that followed from 1877 to the 1920s was a disaster for black people as unrelenting white supremacist governments in the South established Jim Crow laws that segregated, and disenfranchised black and even poor white voters. Terrorist groups like the KKK threatened, attacked, and killed those who resisted - both black and white people supporting them. Public schools were targeted and burned, and teachers harassed and killed. Despite this, black literacy soared, and by 1900 the majority of black people were literate.
The effect of Jim Crow laws also impacted black people’s ability to not only find work, but to gain training and advancement in work when they got it. Many were driven out of professions due to this persistent racism, with no one in power willing to pursue justice. After WWI, a large number of black people decided to flee the South and move to other places, either in the North or Midwest. The “Red Summer” of 1919 saw an explosion of race riots. In 1921, the Greenwood district, also known as the “Black Wallstreet”, of Tulsa Oklahoma was destroyed when mobs of white people, many of them armed and deputized by local police, attacked businesses and homes after a confrontation at the police station by black former soldiers to stop a group of white men from lynching a young black man who was accused of molesting a young white woman (which turned out to be false accusations). Recent analysis shows 39 dead, 26 black and 13 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records. More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals. About 10,000 black people were left homeless, and the cost of the property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $39.66 million in 2024). By the end of 1922, most of the residents' homes had been rebuilt, but the city and real estate companies refused to compensate them. It is considered one of the worse instances of racial violence in US history.
Jim Crow laws in the South not only segregated black people, it also created a system where the judiciary gave preferential treatment to white people, while throwing the book at black people for minor offenses. Felony disenfranchisement removed the right to vote for people convicted of felony offenses, and during the Jim Crow era, this was mostly black people - further suppressing the ability of black people and poor white people from forming coalitions that would threaten white supremacy of the former planter class.
“Democrats worked hard to prevent populist coalitions. In the former Confederate South, from 1890 to 1908, starting with Mississippi, legislatures of ten of the eleven states passed disenfranchising constitutions, which had new provisions for poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements and other devices that effectively disenfranchised nearly all Blacks and tens of thousands of poor Whites. Hundreds of thousands of people were removed from voter registration rolls soon after these provisions were implemented.” - Wikipedia
During Jim Crow former slaves were often arrested and worked in much the same way as before the war. Since impoverished state governments could not afford penitentiaries, they leased out prisoners to work at private firms. This continued and evolved into the Prison Industrial Complex we still have to this day.
American Genocide
After the Revolutionary War, the United States of America treated native tribes as semi-independent nations, and as such the government negotiated treaties directly with them until the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 ended recognition of independent Native nations, and started treating them as "domestic dependent nations" subject to applicable federal laws. In the beginning, President Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox conceived the idea of "civilizing" Native Americans in preparation for their assimilation as U.S. citizens and this continued through succeeding administrations. In the eighteenth century, Europeans saw history as a linear, inevitable, and perpetual process of sociocultural evolution led by Western Europe. From the reductionist cultural perspective of Western Europe, colonialists saw non-Europeans as "backward nations", as people intrinsically incapable of socioeconomic progress. In France, the philosopher Marquis de Condorcet formally postulated the existence of a European "holy duty" to help non-European peoples "which, to civilize themselves, wait only to receive the means from us, to find brothers among Europeans, and to become their friends and disciples".
The best estimate of indigenous populations in the Americas prior to 1500 is 50 million people. Estimates of pre-Columbian population of the United States vary from 4 to 18 million. Exposure to European diseases is thought to have caused the majority of deaths of native peoples in America. Then there were the European settlers.
The justification for the continued conquest and subjugation of the indigenous population in the United States of America throughout our history was put to words in the very first document adopted unanimously by the delegates of the second Continental Congress on July 4th 1776 that forms the independence of the USA: The Declaration of Independence. In it, among the many descriptions of dereliction and hurts caused by the monarch it lists: "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” From then on it has largely been down hill. I would also point out, the description of the indigenous people as merciless savages probably fits better the European colonists and settlers as we have seen from the beginning of this essay.
The 19th century saw the massive expansion of westward movement of settlers displacing indigenous populations. Just as slavery was justified with religious and pseudo-scientific ideals, so too was the dominion over lands previously controlled by the native populations. “Manifest Destiny” was the phrase used to encapsulate this rationalization:
According to historian William Earl Weeks, there were three basic tenets behind the concept:
The assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States.
The assertion of its mission to redeem the world by the spread of republican government and more generally the "American way of life".
The faith in the nation's divinely ordained destiny to succeed in this mission.
Continued pressure from settlers moving into indigenous territories led to forced relocations (Trail of Tears) that further decimated populations, and even resistance such as the Sioux Uprising and Battle of Little Bighorn failed to slow the tide washing over the land. By 1920 the population of indigenous peoples in the United States was at its lowest point: 270,995. This was around the same time as the race riots of the 1920s. By the turn of the last century the indigenous people were on their final reservations, and black people were thoroughly suppressed and segregated.
The Progressive Era & The New Deal
Along with the government and the settlers came the corporations in all shapes and sizes. Their main focus was on liberating the natural and mineral resources, and sent rails and telegraph lines across the land, speeding transportation and communication - increasing ten-fold the pressure on the remaining Indian tribes. These corporations were largely unregulated and their unfettered access and power to do as they please led to excesses that are starting to seem familiar to us today. Reformers during this era, known as Progressives, sought to address issues they associated with rapid industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and political corruption, as well as the concentration of industrial ownership in monopolies.
Progressives fought to hold corporations accountable by regulating them through trustbusting, antitrust laws, and supporting the establishment of new government agencies to regulate industry, with the goal of promoting fair competition. Consumers were suffering, and the poor in particular couldn’t keep up.
Similarly, workers for these monopolies were getting the short end of the stick with wages that they couldn’t survive on. In 1873 a financial panic caused the ‘Long Depression’ - the largest economic depression to hit the United States before the Great Depression. Corporations lowered wages to keep their bottom lines stable, but there was no social safety net, and workers were expected to keep working for practically nothing. Unemployment rose dramatically, reaching 14 percent by 1876, with many more severely underemployed, and wages overall dropping to 45% of their previous level. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 started when Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad president John W. Garrett cut wages by ten per cent to increase dividends by the same percentage for shareholders. Violence broke out as the Governor of Maryland sent militia into get the trains moving again, and battles ensued with firearms. The strike spread to several other railroads, and reached coast to coast. People living in key cities joined the strikers to protest how the railroads used their city streets in dirty and unsafe manners. Over 100,000 people were involved in the strike, 1000 were jailed, and 100 were killed when the Federal government sent troops in to break up the strike. The strike led to the increase in labor unions and support for them in government with the formation of the Bureau of Labor. In 1913 the Department of Labor was made a cabinet level department.
With the Stock Market Crash of October 1929 and the Bank Runs that ensued, the Great Depression began and spread worldwide. It was again a time of high unemployment, low wages, and lost opportunity. With banks closed, people were selling their bank deposit books for pennies on the dollar to put food on the table. Famine and poverty descended over the land. Corporations couldn’t hide as profits plunged, although the rich had the resources in most cases to weather the storm as everyone else slipped under the water. During the market crash, rich investors tried to stem the tide and give people confidence in the market by buying the stocks at rock bottom prices (and consolidated more wealth as a result), but it failed and the unregulated stock market took an extended two month slide to the bottom taking billions of dollars with it. A quarter of the workforce was unemployed, and farmers were in deep trouble as prices had fallen by 60%. Industrial production had fallen by more than half since 1929. Two million people were homeless. By the evening of March 4 1933, 32 states—as well as the District of Columbia—had closed their banks.
President Herbert Hoover did little to combat the depression, and Franklin Roosevelt won a massive landslide election in 1932 and took office in 1933 at the lowest point in the depression. His plan was composed of three elements: "relief, recovery, and reform". Relief was urgently needed by the unemployed. Recovery meant boosting the economy back to normal, and reform was required of the financial and banking systems. Roosevelt did all of these things to varying degrees: He reformed financial regulations with the Glass–Steagall Act, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to underwrite savings deposits. The act also limited affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms. In 1934, the Securities and Exchange Commission was created to regulate the trading of securities, while the Federal Communications Commission was established to regulate telecommunications.
In 1935-1936 he addressed the relief and recovery efforts with the National Labor Relations Act to protect labor organizing, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief program (which made the federal government the largest employer in the nation), the Social Security Act and new programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers. The final major items of New Deal legislation were the creation of the United States Housing Authority and the FSA, which both occurred in 1937; and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set maximum hours and minimum wages for most categories of workers. With the recession of 1937, a new Congress came into power in 1939, consolidating conservatives and giving Southern states control. Roosevelt couldn’t get anymore new programs passed, and was only able to hold on to what he had through the veto.
The New Deal had lasting effects including, the 8 hour work day, minimum wage, abolition of child labor, social security - including unemployment insurance and benefits for the handicapped, food stamps (SNAP) to help feed the poor, liberal trade policy that existed until Trump’s second administration, guarantee of collective barganing for workers and creation of the National Labor Relations Board led to soaring union membership, FDA and Dept. of Agriculture tested and regulated the safety and quality of food and cosmetics, and many other systems that set the stage for the prosperity and social justice that would prevail following World War II (WWII). WWII brought full employment and effectively ended the Great Depression. A major result of the full employment at high wages was a sharp, long-lasting decrease in the level of income inequality (Great Compression). This led to the expansion of the middle class that lasted into the 1970s.
The policies of the New Deal had impacts beyond the Great Depression, and inspired future Presidents. Between 1940 and 1980, there was the progressive consensus about the prospects for the widespread distribution of prosperity within an expanding capitalist economy. Especially Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal and in the 1960s Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society used the New Deal as inspiration for a dramatic expansion of progressive programs. As the first Republican president elected after Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961) built on the New Deal. He sanctioned a major expansion of Social Security by a self-financed program. He supported such New Deal programs as the minimum wage and public housing—he greatly expanded federal aid to education and built the Interstate Highway system primarily as defense programs (rather than jobs program).
The Democrats New Deal coalition was able to dominate politics into the 1960s, and this led to further advancements in Civil Rights and Voting Rights that finally put an end to Jim Crow and segregation in the South, and ensured free and fair elections. Over the intervening years, indigenous people, black people, LGBTQ+ people have all had their rights and lives improved through legislation and supreme court rulings. Perhaps we as a nation could turn our backs on the past, and create new systems to leave dominion behind, and become mature stewards for the next century?
Deregulation Era - Turning Back The Clock To 1500
On January 20th 1981, President Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, and ushered in a new era that would begin to dismantle much of the progress made in the previous hundred years.
Actually it really began 10 years earlier, in 1971: President Richard Nixon had a problem; productivity and employment were up, but also inflation. High inflation led to high costs, and people would blame him for this - which he was afraid would impact his election to a second term. He was concerned about how to fix this, and called in his advisors to give him options. In 1970 a Democrat majority Congress had given the president the power to engage wage and price freezes, not thinking Nixon would use them. This gave him the tool he needed: Nixon issued Executive Order 11615 pursuant to the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, unilaterally imposing 90-day wage and price controls, a 10% import surcharge, and most importantly "closed the gold window", making the dollar inconvertible to gold directly, except on the open market. This had the desired effect, and he was elected to a second term. However inflation returned after the Watergate affair and was something Gerald Ford would have to deal with.
Concurrent with the United States and the rest of the world going off the gold standard, the Chicago School of Economics at the University of Chicago was busy working on new ideas, and among them was a new philosophy of business, in the person of Professor Milton Friedman and in the form of the “Friedman Doctrine” introduced in a New York Times essay: A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits. In it, he argued that a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders. This went over like gangbusters, and every corporation latched onto this like it was the holy grail. Greed is good.
So the middle class started to suffer, but it was a slow bleed that wasn’t really felt right away. As with all economics, it is not really a science because of the myriad factors involved (people). But, one thing stands out to me about this era: people were willing to monkey around with things, and reframe them, even or maybe especially if they didn’t understand them. Somehow wages get decoupled from productivity in 1971 and here we are with Ronald Reagan taking the oath of office.
President Reagan immediately began to implement his policy called ‘Reaganomics’. It was very simple at a glance: deregulate everything, and give subsidies to corporations in the form of tax cuts. He argued that the benefits of giving money to corporations, and the rich was they would create more jobs and the money would ‘trickle down’ to the workers. During his time in office, wages further lost ground, productivity was up though. He failed in his goal to lower government spending, and the federal deficit tripled during his presidency. His presidency signaled more things to come. I wonder where all that money went that wasn’t paid to workers? Trickle down economics was a bust, and I bet you can tell now where all the money went.
As I stated in a previous article, we can mark the dissolution of the New Deal coalition at the point at which Bill Clinton is elected in 1992, replacing the New Deal coalition with the neo-liberals of the New Democrats. The New Democrats cozied up with corporate moguls by being for laissez-faire capitalism, while being culturally liberal. They abandoned unions which collapsed, the poor, and the middle class. Everyone at the time said this would be a good thing, because what was really important were these unresolved social issues; we were all good economically, right? So the middle class just went along with it, largely without comment because they were still doing okay, or so they thought. Milton Friedman argued: “relationships between companies and workers are purely voluntary and mistreated workers will seek better treatment elsewhere. Thus, most companies will compete for workers on the basis of pay, benefits, and work-life balance just as they compete with one another in the marketplace on the basis of the relative cost and quality of their goods.” In practice this did not happen, and wages stagnated and benefits dropped, and costs went up for the middle class and working class, and like a frog slowly being boiled in water - they were in hot water before they knew it.
The middle class was overextended on credit, holding large mortgages when the housing bubble created by predatory lending practices, enabled by deregulation in prior administrations allowing sub-prime lending to low income families, burst in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. This culminated in the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, who held a large amount of these subprime notes, and an international banking crisis. This came to be known as the Great Recession. Median household wealth fell 35% in the U.S., from $106,591 to $68,839 between 2005 and 2011. A report showed that the distribution of household incomes in the United States became more unequal during the post-2008 economic recovery, a first for the United States but in line with the trend over the last ten economic recoveries since 1949. Income inequality in the United States grew from 2005 to 2012 in more than 2 out of 3 metropolitan areas.
Which brings us back around full circle to my own experiences in the corporate world. Dominion is the common thread that runs through this story; legalized, justified, religiously sanctioned, in the shadows, and in your face. It is tied to the fallacy of white European exceptionalism, and the fallacy of their responsibility to ‘civilize’ the ‘savage’ people in the ‘new’ world. It is tied to the corporate greed and continuing that European white exceptionalism at the top of corporations whose primary function is to extract wealth from the common people. If the corporation decided it was in their best interests to poison the well, so be it. If the people who used the well were sickened or died, it was justified by the increase in profits such action resulted. Dominion.
This time around they have to contend with democracy. It has to be more subtle: like boiling a frog in cold water; as the heat increases he doesn’t feel it. We are that frog. They are programming us for neofeudalism. They aren’t concerned about a better world for all of us - the rich only want what’s best for them, at our expense if necessary.
We Have Two Choices
I hope people can see how history has become, not a chain of progress climbing ever higher representing the increasing maturity of mankind, but a circle - a circle that has turned back upon itself and brings us not to 1890s nor even the 1850s, but to the raw dominion that emerged from 15th century Europe in the form of all things European including technology, corporations, religion, laws, property ownership, and literal dominion over all of the Earth without concern for the existing indigenous populations.
These European ideals have had their time in their raw and unbridled form - boy have they - since the moment Christopher Columbus stepped foot upon that little island in the Bahamas to today. 533 years and counting. Save for a brief moment of time mid-century from the 1960s to the 1980s and we at least thought and acted like we were the mature responsible society we have now failed thunderously to be in the years since.
In some respects we may be able to forgive our former historical figures for their failings given their lack of practical conceptualization of human rights and democracy; we are duty bound not to forgive our contemporaries who have shown colossal ignorance and arrogant attempts to dominate people and society in general in this modern age. It is unforgivable and they should know better. We see them now for who they really are.
So now we have a choice: we can either continue to allow this cycle of dominion to continue, or we can break the bonds of servitude and build a new system for a new age.
I refuse to believe that the three decades from the 1960s to the 1980s represent the true high point of human civilization. I say we need to create a new recurring cycle of kindness, responsibility, love, and mature stewardship for the world that increases civil rights, freedom, and security for everyone forever more.
If incorporation is a power bestowed by government, and if a democracy is a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” then it only makes sense that in such a government, corporations must not stand above the people and the public interest, but serve the people - all of the people - and the public good. The freedom of the rich, cartels, and monopolies must never stand above the rights of the people at large. Single individuals and boards of directors of corporations which can do significant damage must be regulated by democratically elected representatives, and the shape, form, and size of the corporation must be regulated so as not to allow this damage to happen in the first place. “Too big to fail” must never be an excuse to allow people and the environment to be damaged beyond repair in the interests of monetary profits.
SOURCES:
“The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It” - Robert Reich
NOTES:
This is but the tip of the iceberg of this topic, with many more details underpinning and supporting the timeline. I encourage everyone to follow the links in the essay to go deeper and do your own research beyond what I’ve curated here if you are curious or have any doubts.
The black and indigenous struggles in America are struggles that entwine all of us, comprising aspects of conquest, colonialism, domination, and religious exceptionalism, and impacts more than just black and native peoples, but any culture, skin color, ideals, or identities that are deemed wrong or an attack on white culture. The hurt it has caused to blacks, brown, native Americans, Asians, and immigrants, has created a stain on white culture that may never be able to be washed away in our lifetimes. The more I dug into the history, the more it occurred to me that the fundamental tenents held by the owners of corporations and those entrusted to run them were at odds with the best interests of society. Furthermore, they held corporate beliefs and resultant actions to stand above that of the people in a democratic society.
I think the best way to address this is to confront all people, but white people especially, with the facts and history and how each step of the way, each unjust law passed, each right taken, each election rigged, each crime committed, all lead step by step to where we are today. To get out of this hell-scape we find ourselves in, we must take that in, accept it, and dedicate ourselves to reversing everything that allowed white supremacy to exist in this country, forever more. It must not only be forced to the lunatic fringe, it must be eradicated. Denying it and sticking our heads in the sand is unacceptable.
Just as we are not separate from the universe, we are also not separate from history; we are part of it, individually and collectively.
You're welcome. It occurred to me an even simpler way to express the thousands of words above:
Systems are created by people - they can be changed. We have done so in the past.
For 533 years we've been living under a system based on dominion. There is no reason to keep doing so today - and many reasons to rebuild it.
Thank you.